GLENWOOD SPRINGS —Perhaps three dozen business owners, entrepreneurs and other commercially minded folks from the Western Slope crowded into the Roosevelt Room at the Hotel Colorado on Thursday, to hear as much as they could about the state’s plans for economic development in the coming months and years.

But rather than just listen, some of the group gave advice and more to the five representatives of the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) who sat at a table at the front of the room.

Which, said SBDC Director Kelly Manning, was just as it should have been.

“This is a listening tour for us,” she said, introducing the five advisory board members — Pete LeBarre, Dixie Malone, Ron Baalman, Courtney Berg and Jon Maraschin, all with varying business experience in a wide array of fields.

Over the course of an hour and a half, audience members peppered the panel with questions about such issues as overbearing regulation by state bureaucrats, banks that won’t lend money for new businesses, and more.

But more than two thirds of the meeting, which lasted from 2-3:30 p.m., and a little more, was taken up by discussion of the potential for economic development opened up by Amendment 64, the voter-approved law passed last November that legalized the growth and use of industrial hemp.

Spain came under repeated attack starting Thursday in what authorities called linked terrorist incidents, when a driver swerved a van into crowds in Barcelona’s historic Las Ramblas district, killing more than a dozen people and injuring scores of others. Early Friday, an attempted attack unfolded in a town down the coast

If there’s one superhero character whose rise might be most tied to the events of World War II, it is Captain America, who emerged from the minds of legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and sprung forth from an iconic 1941 debut cover on which Cap smacks Hitler right in the kisser.

A customer dining at Washington’s Oceanaire restaurant noticed an unusual line at the bottom of his receipt: “Due to the rising costs of doing business in this location, including costs associated with higher minimum wage rates, a 3% surcharge has been added to your total bill.”